“I’ll call you tomorrow, dear, after I’ve settled into my hotel. It seems you’re still a big groggy. We're still on for that luncheon on the fourteenth?”
“Oh, uh, of course we are. Thank you, Dr. James, for being so kind as to submit my name for consideration. I appreciate everything you do for me.”
“Say nothing of it. Just rest up. If you get the job, you report to work at four a.m. daily.” I could hear the sarcasm in her voice and rolled my eyes.
“Thank you again, Dr. James.”
“Goodbye, Haley.”
She hung up, and I sat there speechless for a moment. Her timing was awful. How could I tell Parker I was up for a job working with his enemy? Right after we agreed that we wanted arelationship. He’d never speak to me again. I’d be giving up my job here and my relationship with him in the same fell swoop.
I sighed heavily and stood, holding the towel around myself as I plodded across the room and back to bed. I let the towel drop to the floor next to the bed and slid under the covers, laying my phone on the nightstand. Parker surprised me by turning and pulling me into his chest. I felt his morning wood press into my thigh.
“Early morning phone call?” he asked, kissing my shoulder.
“My mentor, Dr. James. Sometimes, she calls this early. It’s annoying, but she is incredible and I’m lucky to have her.” I ran my hand through his hair and turned on my side to face him, draping my left leg over his hips.
“What did the great Dr. James have to say?” he asked. He pulled me against his body harder, crushing my breasts between us.
“Nothing that important. She’s going to call back tomorrow.” I hated hiding things from him, but now was not the time for that discussion.
“Good, I want breakfast.” Parker bit my collarbone and scooted beneath the blanket, finding my nipple and sucking on it.
“You mean like muffins and bacon?” I snickered as his kisses trailed over my stomach and lower toward my mound.
“I mean like tacos… Wonder if they’re as good for breakfast as they were for a midnight snack.”
I closed my eyes and enjoyed his soft massaging and kissing, but I had to force away the thought of leaving him for a job two thousand miles away. I didn’t want to leave him. I just found him. But I also didn’t want to stay stuck in a career move that I would regret later on. Global was everyone’s dream, so the man whose mouth was pleasuring my secret places right now was a definite roadblock.
14
PARKER
Jack Williams refused to sit across from me and talk to me like a man. Instead, he paced my office angrily, the door left ajar so the entire newsroom could hear what he shouted at me. I tried to remain calm, but I never was one for negotiating conflict in a rational manner, not when I had the authority to quash the cockroaches that had the balls to creep out while the lights were still on.
“Either sit down or get out of my office.” Frustrated enough that I could no longer sit, I leaned over the desk and rested my palms on the cool wood. I could see eyes turn my direction through the window. I could also see Haley, Tom, and David standing outside my office waiting to be invited in.
“I don’t buy it, Danvers. You have people for things like that. You weren’t at the restaurant because you had a car accident. You were there on a date. Admit it.” Williams stopped pacing directly across from where I stood. He glowered down his nose at me and crossed his arms over his chest, puffing it out like he was intimidating to me or something.
I stood straighter and adjusted my tie. “You are allowed to think what you want, but the truth of the matter is that we werethere to discuss the car accident. Ms. Spencer’s car was totaled by the accident instigated by my driver. You’ll also be happy to know the paper is buying her a new car as a bonus to thank her for the hard work she’s put into making this company a success. If you spent half as much time doing your job as you did complaining, you’d be getting promoted and receiving bonuses.”
Jack’s glower briefly shifted to shock, then hardened into a glare. “You’re going to regret telling me that.” He shook his head. “What you’ve done is created a double standard. You can date someone who works for you, but people who work together beneath you can’t date?”
“Did you stop to think that if you hadn’t crossed professional lines by having sex within the office, on company property, that no one would have cared about your dating Gretchen?” I scoffed. “Get out.”
“Well, her wrongful termination suit is moving forward. You’ll rue the day you ever took action against her. I’ll see to that.”
Jack stormed out, slamming the door behind him, and he glared at Haley as he walked past her in the hallway. I knew both Tom and David heard his comments, and I didn’t even care. There was no time to sit and debate about the appropriateness of my dating Haley. We hadn’t made anything official, other than stating to each other privately that feelings were happening on both sides. And I held fast to my conviction—I owned the paper, and everyone could mind their own business.
I nodded at Tom, who stood with his hand on the outer doorknob, waiting. At my gesture he opened and entered, followed by David and Haley. She had a grimace on her face, and David and Tom avoided eye contact. I knew the elephant was taking up too much space in the room, so I addressed it immediately so as not to waste any time discussing things that were no one’s business.
“Shut the door and have a seat. I’ll just make it known that Jack Williams has an issue with my treatment of Haley as a staff member. You clearly heard his accusations. Let’s just put that to bed—we’re not talking about it. Now, if you have updates for me regarding this toxic spill in Ohio, I’m all ears. We need to break this story open before Global does.” I sat down, making sure my tie was tucked beneath my jacket neatly.
David cleared his throat and squirmed. His facial expression said he wasn’t happy about dismissing Jack’s accusations and threats, but he knew better than to speak to me about them after I banned the topic. Tom, however, had the balls to do so, but he was the one who dived right into the updates and forged a path away from the drama which was fading by the second. I looked to Haley, who now had her eyes fixed on her tablet in her lap.
“Well, Haley’s done a fantastic job with this one. It appears the Feds refused aid in Ohio stating that Ohio was not eligible. That’s not the breaking news. What we intend to break is the fact that the initial response was done incorrectly and actually made things worse.” Tom looked up at me. “This is literally a national disaster, and no one even knows the government could have stopped it. It’s worse than the oil spill in the Gulf from the Deep Water Horizon in 2010.”
I shook my head and huffed out a sigh. “Haley, your source is feeding actual science here?”
